Vehicle Technology and Aviation Bill (Second sitting)

Alan Brown Excerpts

Tuesday 14th March 2017 Public Bill Committees

[Mr Baker]

Does anybody else wish to add anything on that point? No? Thank you very much.

[Alan Brown (Kilmarnock and Loudoun) (SNP)]

Q Earlier, in the discussion with Rob, there was discussion about phraseology—about large fuel retailers or just retailers—and an issue with forecourts. I want to clarify something. I am not sure if forecourts are mentioned in the Bill, so is that a red herring? Is it not going to be up to the retailers to site the charging points where they are most convenient?

Following on from the previous question, if you are not blocking the forecourt, a rapid charger may take 30 minutes, but is that not an opportunity for sales if it is the shops that make all the money? I would have thought that for somebody who is travelling, if it is an intermediate store, it would be an ideal opportunity to park and charge their car, go into the shop, buy a newspaper or a magazine and a few snacks, sit in their car, then move on. Is there not a business opportunity there?

Edward Woodall: Yes, there is. As we said in our submission, only 11% of sites have seating areas for customers, so there might not be the capacity to manage all that. Equally, how big is a forecourt site? Think about your local forecourt site—how many cars can it fit? For some of these electric vehicle charging areas, they will not consider it unless it is an acre or an acre-and-a-half-sized site.

Teresa Sayers: Certainly, the charging sites would have to be on the periphery of a forecourt. The current configuration of estates has very limited space to accommodate any parked vehicles. As was previously mentioned, the business model is a very high throughput of vehicles. The maximum duration on the forecourt is usually below five minutes—they fill up, pay and leave. It is just not built and configured to have additional cars there for a very long period of time.

[Kit Malthouse (North West Hampshire) (Con)]

Q I want to ask about brevity. Mr Woodall, I have to confess that I cannot ever remember spending more than five or 10 minutes in a convenience store—presumably, that is why they are called convenience stores, because it is convenient and quick—so I cannot quite see the model of me pulling up in my electric car, plugging in for the half an hour or even 15 minutes, and spending that time in the convenience store, particularly when the number of spaces will necessarily be limited. There will not be 15 or 20 spaces; you might perhaps have two, which might therefore be full the whole time. Do your members really see this as a big business opportunity or is there a Government subsidy available so you might as well take it?

Edward Woodall: I agree with all those points. I think it is difficult in our format of retail to deliver electric charging, given that both on forecourts and in convenience stores, there is large throughput and we are usually in areas of small parades where there are limited parking spaces, or they are on forecourts that are likewise limited for parking space.

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[Andrew Selous]

Q Has the insurance industry thought about these two groups?

Ben Howarth: The potential limitation is that we do not know when this completely automated technology is going to come to market. We are assuming about 2021, but we cannot be 100% certain. There is quite a gap until then.

Telematics, which Iain mentioned, are not directly linked because it is a plug-in the insurer gives you that is not necessarily built directly into the car, but that is probably the first step towards an insurance policy tailored much more around tracking what you as an individual do, rather than broader risk factors.

Longer term, we are talking about cars that will take away the most common human errors and make the road safer. Increasingly, insurance is going to be tailored around the vehicle rather than how the individual behaves. Where you are talking about younger drivers particularly, their behaviour is going to become less of a factor. So you would not necessarily be thinking about age as a relevant risk factor when you look forward into the future. For older people and people who are vulnerable and do not have access to cars at the moment, this is transformational. We probably have not done any more work than any other witnesses on the evidence of that.

[Alan Brown]

Q I have a couple of questions. The first one is for Ben. We have conflicting information about insurance cost. Insurance cost could be much higher because of the repair cost and the lack of people qualified to do the repairs, as well as the cost of the car itself, but there are also expectations that insurance costs will come down because there will be fewer accidents. Is it fair to say that at the moment there is just not enough information to do accurate modelling to understand what insurance figures are going to look like?

Ben Howarth: I think that some people have tried to do modelling, but there is that uncertainty between those two things. We don’t actually know what the cars are going to cost on the market, and that is obviously going to be a factor in the insurance premiums as well. That said, our members are really enthusiastic about the technology. I think they all recognise that it is the future of driving. We don’t know exactly when it is going to come to the road, but it is going to happen. I think they are going to be very keen to be involved in it from day one, and to therefore be offering competitive products that people will want. So there is a market incentive to say, “Don’t make this too expensive.”

In terms of really detailed modelling on the exact price, we do not know enough. On the technology side, a lot of that is developing now. We are going to get many more assisted cars. They might not be fully autonomous and self-driven, but that technology is the same kind of technology that will eventually lead to automated driving. We have already started work on resolving the questions around how good the repair network is going to be, so it is not just a question of waiting for automated driving and then it switching over.

[Alan Brown]

Q Are there any special requirements that insurance companies would need for different testing, for example showing that people are capable of using the software or, with a semi-autonomous vehicle, when the right moment is to take action? We know that some people have trouble switching from a gear stick to manual, so this is another quantum leap. Are there any special requirements that insurance companies would like to see, going forward?

Ben Howarth: I do not think we would have any, other than what interested parties in the road safety world would want. I think we want drivers to be well informed about what they have to do. They have to know how this technology that they are taking on the road works and be confident about when they can and cannot use it. That is probably going to need to be part of the driver testing regime. It is a valid question to ask whether the driving test that you take at 17, which never changes again, is fit for purpose when technology will potentially be upgraded on a regular basis. That is worth further consideration. I am not sure that is for this Bill, but it is definitely something we will need to think about before the cars are commercially available.

[Alan Brown]

Q I just wonder what input your organisations have in the testing trials that are ongoing. I know that there have been four trials in different parts of England, but I am thinking of the bigger issues. If we look at it from a Scottish perspective, we have rural roads, single-track roads and different weather conditions. There are connectivity issues, which my colleague touched on earlier. What plans are there to review the tests that are ongoing? How much more robust do the tests need to be and how is that going to be rolled out across the rest of the UK?

Iain Forbes: My team actually oversees the research programme that is paying for the tests you mention, the four city driverless car trials. It is really important when taking forward the competitions to have as open a process as possible. We work closely with Innovate UK, the Government’s innovation agency, to design competitions around challenges where we think it is likely that the UK is going to be able to pull through developments in the research base into products that are going to be usable and commercially viable. The initial set of tests were in London, Bristol, Milton Keynes and Coventry. We anticipate having future rounds of competitions that will be open to anyone in the UK to participate in if they want to form consortium bidding.

[Mr Hayes]

Q You know that the Bill attempts to strike a balance between, on the one hand, doing enough not to constrain future development—indeed, to facilitate it—and, on the other hand, trying to determine what the schedule describes as an “unknowable future”. Have we got that right, or should we have done more? I draw particular attention to the relationship between connection and automation and the issues of privacy and security of data. Should we do more now, or is it enough that we take powers to do things when we know more later?

Iain Forbes: It is a really important question. The advent of automated vehicle technology will in time require changes to different parts of our regulatory system. We have heard about some of those already today. The trick is to try to find ways of targeting the areas where we think action is necessary now in order to unblock barriers, or where we know technology is near to market. We need to make sure that we have the framework in place to enable the safe use of that technology.

To some extent it is a question that different people have different views on, but we certainly consulted last year with a range of different stakeholders on the areas where they thought action was necessary in order to ensure that the UK was doing the right things to set up a framework. The area in the Bill was the one that stakeholders highlighted as the one that was most important to act on first.

In time we will have to have further steps in the process of getting our regulatory framework ready. In doing so, I would hope to follow the same approach of identifying where the barriers are that need action now and which technologies are nearer to market. We need to make sure that we have the framework in place to enable those.

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[Tom Tugendhat]

Q Does the Bill affect people such as astronomers using them as you suggest?

Martin Drake: We do not think so. We have done quite a bit of research on the legitimate use of laser technology, and boy, is it useful. Eye surgery uses lasers; you said surveying. There is a whole list of them. The equipment that uses those sorts of laser is designed to use the laser in that way, and it tends to have safety functions, so that if the laser strays, it shuts down, and of course it is used by trained people. The people who have those lasers fully understand their dangers and how to use them, and the Bill does talk about legitimate use. We are not in any way, shape or form saying that there are not really good reasons for using a laser. However, when they are used irresponsibly at the powers of laser that we are seeing, that gives us cause for concern. Most legitimate lasers do not have the powers that we are seeing. I say “most” because some do, but most of them do not have the powers that we are seeing, which people can quite happily buy over the internet and have delivered to their home.

Simon Bray: There is a clear defence within the Bill, and that is something that we have been paying close attention to in terms of our investigations.

[Alan Brown]

Q We have heard that lasers are becoming more common, and you obviously support the proposed legislation. It is similar with drones, which are becoming more accessible and more common. Would you like to see proposals to ensure better regulation and safety with regard to the use of drones?

Steve Landells: From BALPA’s point of view, we would certainly like to see more regulations and toughening up around drones. We understand that a lot of work is going on at the moment and there is a DFT consultation, but yes, it would be good to see drones in there.

Simon Bray: Likewise, whatever regulation comes out and whatever changes there might be to navigation orders and so on, we would like a simple set of regulations for the police to get involved with enforcing.

[Andrew Selous]

Q Chief Inspector Goodwin, I think you were expressing some concern about the increase in sales of lasers recently, and the possible need to regulate their sale. Do we have any figures on recent sales of lasers? Has there been a significant increase recently, and do we have any sense of the split in sales between legitimate use—such as for eye surgery, which we just heard about—and illegitimate use?

Richard Goodwin: I think what we are talking about is laser pens in particular. I suspect my colleagues from BALPA are probably better placed to go into the detail, because they have done some of their own market testing.

Martin Drake: Yes, indeed. When we realised that lasers were becoming an issue, we decided to spend some time looking at what was available. In some parts of the world—in fact, just down the road here—you can go into the local market and buy a laser that purports to be 500 milliwatts. We bought three of those and had them tested, and they varied between 280 and 650 milliwatts. They are about $20, give or take, and they are readily available.

At the higher end—you tend not to be able to buy those on the street; you have to go to the internet—a quick search will show you that they are available. The price has fallen considerably. When we started 10 years ago, £700 would be what you would pay for the most powerful laser. You can buy a 5-watt laser today off the internet for around $269. I do not think anyone has done the numbers, but experience tells me they are probably out there and being used.

There are certain countries where you cannot post a laser to over the internet; the USA springs to mind. You can only buy legitimate lasers from legitimate sources in the US. One of the companies we have investigated clearly says on its website: “We cannot post these products to the USA”. They are out there and they are relatively easy to buy. The advertising is up there and if you are of that mind, you can burst balloons, set fire to matches and do all these lovely things, make your cat chase around the room with it. They are up there. The advertising is there, so there is a market.